TRAVEL REVIEW: IULLY.com Online Travel Agency

IULLY.com recently contacted me and said they would buy me a yacht if I traveled around the world and talk about the power of humans. I respectfully declined because I don’t want to upset any robots, so instead, I offered to check out and review their new online travel agency and share with you what I think. While this is a sponsored post, I always promise to give a fair and honest review for you all.

Iully Online Travel Agency - Homepage Screenshot

IULLY Online Travel Agents is a chat-based company established in San Francisco in 2011 with the vision of bringing “human touch” to the online travel industry and providing the best customer service.

Simplicity, reliability and price are the most important things to me when it comes to booking travel plans, so I reviewed the IULLY service based on those 3 things.

SITE FUNCTIONALITY:

Iully.com is a nicely designed site that looks a bit cartoonish, but has a very clear goal – to help you with booking flights online.

The site directs you to “Chat” where you enter your name and email and than an Iully Agent begins a conversation with you. I was third in line to chat when I called and someone got in touch not 2 minutes after. Once connected, she asked what I needed and then asked me to hold so she could search for flights.

About 4 minutes after explaining what I needed she came back with a proposed itinerary that rivaled other online travel site prices in a very neat, simple display.

Iully Online Travel Agent - Chat Screenshot

I asked her about the Kayak and Expedia deals I found and she said she could offer the same price for the Kayak flight and gave me a better rate for another American Airlines flight.

The communication went very smoothly and she was very helpful and patient with all of my requests. In total I got 3 different itinerary quotes from her and she answered a lot of questions in regards to taxes, fees and timing options.

As far as the process goes, it was very simple and felt good talking out options with a real human.

The only thing that I didn’t like about the site is that the contact phone number didn’t work and I’m not sure if the message I sent got through either. Hopefully they will update that shortly.

Iully Online Travel Agent - Proposed Itinerary Screenshot

PRICING:

I compared the Iully service against Kayak, Expedia, Skyscanner and Orbitz pricing for 3 different round-trip flights. All flights were based on departure date of Sept 1, 2012, return date on Dec 1, 2012 and no limitations to layovers or time. The lovely Iully Rep I chatted with told me that while they can’t always match price, they can usually match or beat deals on big travel sites like Priceline and Expedia. In the 3 flights I checked Skyscanner won on two and Iully was able to match Skyscanner and Kayak on the rate of $833 from JFK to London.

I would say if you got a good offer on Expedia, Orbitz or another big travel site, chat with them to see if they could beat it.

I think Iully is a great service for people who may not be real advanced travelers, who want a second pair of eyes on the best deals and options available. I definitely will use this service to double check all my flight purchases in the future.

Here are the major Pros and Cons I found.

Pros:

Live chatting with an Iully travel agent gives the advantage of having a chance to ask any questions about the deal, e.g., baggage rules, travel insurance, and ticket change policies.

All transactions are done through an agent, not an automated process, incase of an issue this could be a benefit.

You can easily reach a agent from anywhere in the world by initiating a chat session over the Internet when they come across any problems after purchasing tickets, e.g., ticket change or cancel.

When customers communicate via an online chat, they can easily copy, paste, and save the session for later reference. They can even email the transcript to them.

Customers can visit any big travel websites to find their perfect flight and then return to us for booking. This way you can ask them to match or beat the best possible price.

They offer customers a two-day grace period option to book the tickets first and pay later.

They are able to help customers accumulate mileage points for their frequent flyer card by entering relevant information into the system while booking customers’ flight.

Cons:

Live chat operating hours are not 24/7 at this time.

Compared with search engines on the majority travel websites, searching for tickets available to match customers’ request by human (our travel agent) may take longer time.

Able to help customers send preferred seat request (window or aisle, front or back) to the airlines, but unable to show customers an aircraft seat map or seating chart.

Do not provide hotels, rental cars, vacations and cruises booking at this time.

The duration of a chat session may be longer than that of purchasing tickets on the majority travel websites.

Because it is a newer site and has a “cartoonish” site, this may leave people questioning the reliability and security of the checkout process.

Not sure of a Iully.com mobile app, but I think that could be a nice advantage.

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